Kilt helped Tintin come out as more PC comic hero
It’s the moment experts say that Tintin stopped being quite so racist, and began his long journey towards what we might now call culturally sensitive “wokeness”. A key drawing of the crime-fighting cub reporter from his British adventure, “The Black Island”, will go under the hammer in Paris next month. Worth an estimated 300,000 euros ($326,000), the A3-sized ink drawing from 1938 marks a turning pointing in the development of the comic book boy hero as a more rounded, self-aware individual.
Having engaged in full-blooded Russophobia in “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets”, and piled on the racial stereotypes in subsequent scrapes in the Congo, America and the Middle East, Tintinologists say the story marks a “stylistic and ideological change”. And they credit Tintin putting on a skirt-or a Scottish kilt, to be more precise-for this radical transformation. Professor Laurence Grove of the University of Glasgow told AFP that in the story Tintin “goes from looking at other cultures from the outside to taking on other cultures.”
Civilizing mission
“He’s not saying, ‘I’m going to tell you what to do,’ as he did he in the Congo where he wanted to turn the natives into good little Belgians. “This time Tintin is saying ‘I’m going to be like you and by doing that I’m going to help solve the problem,’” said the specialist, the president of the International Bande Dessinee Society, the French name for comics.
Loosely based on Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, “39 Steps”, the story has Tintin and his dog Snowy persuing a gang of counterfeiters across Britain, ending up in the Scottish Highlands where a “ferocious beast” kills anyone who dares to set foot on its island. —AFP